Showing titles in Drama & Plays

Gulliver is washed from his ship and lands on an island inhibitated by very tiny people. Tony Church, Derek Hart, and John Wood perform Part I of Gulliver's Travels.

The School For Scandal is Sheridan's master work which wittily illustrates 18th century's aristocrats at play. With pinpoint accuracy Sheridan's characterisation of these decadent ruling classes give it a universal appeal as echoes of both the people and their antics are to be found in each generation.

Taken from Tales from Shakespeare and narrated by Bart Wolffe. The story dramatizes the corroding psychological and political effects produced when its protagonist, the Scottish Lord Macbeth, chooses evil as the way to fulfill his ambition for power.

This "lost race" novel begins as an exciting African adventure. Leonard Outram is a British adventurer who is in Africa seeking his fortune. He becomes part of the rescue of a Portuguese woman from a large slave camp. Leonard, his companion Otter, and the girl set off and find the people of the mist. They then impersonate gods and priests with the hope of getting the people's hoard of jewels.

Pericles, prince of Tyre, sets out to woo a princess and sails headlong into harrowing adventure. Pursued by an evil king, Pericles is blown from port to exotic port. Along the way he finds the love of his life, then loses her and their infant daughter in a storm-tossed sea. Happily, this is a romance - Shakespeare's first - where, in true storybook fashion, miracles reunite the lost with those who love them, bringing joy and safe harbor at last.

When this groundbreaking serialized dramatization premiered on 320 U.S. radio stations, critics were unanimous in their praise. It won numerous honors including the George Foster Peabody Award and the Pulitzer Prize for broadcasting. Never before or since has such an ambitious undertaking been attempted in public radio, and it was accomplished, not by a major network, but by a small nonprofit independent producer in Chicago. That was in 1981. It has been sitting on the shelf ever since.

When the crew of the Oceanus rescued a man close to death, its captain could barely have guessed at the incredible story that man would come to share. This is the story of Victor Frankenstein: a man obsessed with discovering the secret of life and cheating death; a man who brings to life to a body built from corpses; and a man who rejects this would-be child.... Soon Victor and his creature are entangled in a dangerous game of cat and mouse across Europe. But who is truly the monster?

In the cosmopolitan Paris of the 1880s, the new proprietors of the Opera House are amused to discover that their costly acquisition is said to be haunted. But their smiles quickly vanish as tragedy follows misfortune: a murdered stagehand, a fatal accident, a missing girl. Fearful tales of the Opera Ghost race through the corridors and dressing rooms of the theatre. And with good reason - for deep in the catacombs beneath the Opera House, something is stirring.

Abby Mann's classic story about the Nuremberg trials, under which German leaders were found guilty of crimes against humanity in 1945 and 1946. Even today, the play remains a shattering indictment of the consequences of unchecked authority and the seductive power of group thought.

Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. He imagines himself to be a great man, a Napoleon: acting for a higher purpose beyond conventional moral law. But as he embarks on a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a suspicious police investigator, Raskolnikov is pursued by the growing voice of his conscience and finds the noose of his own guilt tightening around his neck.

Insecure siblings fighting for their parents' attention; bickering spouses who can't stand to be together or apart; adultery and sexual experimentation; even the struggle to balance work and family: These are themes as much at home in our time as they were in the twelfth century. In James Goldman's classic play The Lion in Winter, domestic turmoil rises to an art form.

By the time Shakespeare came to write Macbeth - almost certainly in 1605/1606 - he had already completed three of the great tragedies with which modern audiences are so familiar: Hamlet (1601), Othello (1603), and King Lear (1605). Each of those plays gives us an eponymous hero who is in some significant way flawed, but for whom we also inevitably feel deep sympathy, whatever his errors or crimes. But in MacBeth, Shakespeare has chosen for his tragic hero a man guilty of the most terrible crime imaginable to a Jacobean audience, that of regicide - the murder of a king.

“Don’t you wonder: why is it necessary to declare me dead again and again?” This is the question posed by Karl Marx in Howard Zinn’s witty and insightful “play on history.” The premise of this one-man performance is that history’s most famous, and oft-misrepresented, radical is resurrected after agitating with the authorities of the afterlife to clear his name. Through a bureaucratic error, however, Marx lands in modern-day Soho, New York, rather than his old stomping grounds in London, to make his case.

Leo Vincey is haunted by a goddess. In a nighttime vision, she appears to him, revealing her location deep in the mountains of Central Asia. Determined to discover his lost love, he searches for 16 years, finally discovering a lost civilization, ruled by an ambitious queen of unearthly beauty. Could this be his Ayesha reborn? And if so, will the secret of immortality bind them together for eternity?

A delightful British comedy from the wonderful world of P.G. Wodehouse! The perpetually misguided Bertie finds himself embroiled in a madcap adventure sparked by the abrupt departure of his beloved Jeeves.

Konstantin Treplov's literary ambitions and his love for a young aspiring actress evade him. When Nina runs off with his mother's lover, he attempts suicide, comparing himself to a dead seagull destroyed by man's whim.

John Galsworthy’s epic Forsyte Saga follows the fortunes of the venerable Forsyte family, a moneyed clan whose passions are ever at war with its values. Galsworthy won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932 “for his distinguished art of narration, which takes its highest form in the Forsyte...

The artist Mark Rothko has just hired Ken, an aspiring artist, to be his assistant and errand boy. Ken discovers that Rothko's temper can run hot, but as he gets to know his boss better, he finds that Rothko has opened him up to more than just painting. An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance.

Distressed by his father's death and his mother's over-hasty remarriage, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, is faced by a specter from beyond the grave bearing a grim message of murder and revenge. The young prince is driven to the edge of madness by his struggle to understand the situation he finds himself in and to do his duty. Many others, including Hamlet's beloved, the innocent Ophelia, are swept up in his tragedy.

Don Juan in Hell is an excerpt (Act 3, Scene 2) from George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman. It is often performed as a standalone play. In it, three characters from Mozart’s Don Giovanni (Don Juan, Dona Ana, and the statue of the Commendatore, Dona Ana’s father) meet in Hell and, joined by the Devil, have a philosophical debate on a variety of subjects, including Heaven and Hell, men, women and marriage. In the end, they all decide where they will spend eternity.